Danny struggled to turn his head and open his eyes. His lungs were in shock, and pulling in air was difficult. But when he saw Evaline, he managed a choked gasp.
She knelt on the ground before her own cog. Unknown to Danny and Matthias, she had been carrying a chisel and a hammer in her satchel. Where she had found them, Danny had no idea; maybe in Matthias’s toolbox. She gripped a tool in each hand, poised purposefully above the central cog that kept her and Maldon alive.
She glared defiantly at Matthias, who stood rooted to the spot.
“Don’t,” he said, his tone low and frantic. “Eva, you’re being irrational.”
“I’m being irrational? Look at you—you’re destroying yourself! Look at all those you’re making suffer because of your own desires. I fell in love with a man who was selfless and passionate, who told me about London and the life we could live there. But it’s nothing like you said, Matthias. And you’re not that man anymore. I don’t know who you are, but you’re not the person I met in Maldon.”
They stared at each other, Evaline ready to end her own life if that’s what it took to stop him. Danny struggled to his elbows.
“Evaline,” he whispered. “Please, don’t do this. You’ll kill my father. You’ll kill Maldon.”
Her eyes met his, lost. Danny could see in them the urge to give up hope, but he shook his head, silently telling her that not all the threads had been cut yet. Matthias looked from Danny to Evaline and his body relaxed.
“No, you wouldn’t sacrifice your town,” Matthias agreed.
“I’ll leave,” she threatened. “Even if I’m somehow compatible with this tower, I’ll just remove my central cog again and leave.”
“And Stop Enfield like you Stopped Maldon?”
That made her pause. She again looked at Danny, but he had no solution to offer.
“I’m sorry, Danny.” Matthias’s eyes shone with fervor. “I know you won’t forgive me. I don’t deserve forgiveness. But please, don’t get in my way.”
Matthias left Danny in the dirt, moving toward Evaline. She shrank back, but Matthias only knelt and gently took her central cog from her. Evaline dropped her hammer and chisel to reach for the cog, but Matthias stepped out of the way.
“Trust me, Eva.”
Danny tried to grab the man’s ankle as it moved past him, but his body wouldn’t cooperate, curled into a pained comma.
He saw Colton in his mind. Saw the curve of his smile and the glint of his amber eyes, a spark of life so bright that Danny had never seen its like in a human being. He felt him in the tower now, fading, dying, that spark about to be extinguished for good.
Danny pushed himself to his knees, shaking. He took a deep breath and asked his head to kindly stop spinning. He had a town to save.
Something bit into his palm and he hissed. He unfurled his right hand to see that the tiny cog had punctured his palm. A bright bead of blood welled up and rolled into the sweaty creases. It touched the cog, spread between skin and metal.
Danny remembered the moment when a drop of his blood had touched Colton’s clockwork. The shudder of power, the skip in time. The hint of it at the ruined Maldon tower. The blood he’d spilled in Shere.
Aetas’s blood spilled into the ocean, and that’s why it’s so salty.
Danny closed his fist around the cog. Blood seeped onto the metal.
You have more control than you think.
He thought of time, of fibers and threads and the small cracks in between. He thought of ticks and tocks and the sound of air when a pendulum swings through it. He thought of movement, and of hands of black iron making a circle, now standing still. He held the cog tight and cut himself deeper, drawing the fibers closer.
His vision darkened. When it cleared, he inhaled sharply.
He could see the threads between him and Matthias, and between him and Evaline. He saw one, thin and faded, that stretched toward the clock tower. Toward Colton.
Danny stood. He looked all around him, noticing in a distant, offhanded way that he was the only thing moving in Enfield. Everything else had become motionless.
Time fibers crisscrossed one another, like the woven pattern of a tapestry. Danny could see them, the normally pulsing, bright fibers that now thrummed with each pump of his heart.
He was connected to time.
Matthias had stopped mid-step. Danny parted the fibers suspended in the air like they were made of gossamer to reach him. Matthias’s face was determined, his mouth pinched and wrinkled at the corners. Both cogs—Enfield’s and Maldon’s—were nestled in his arms, similar in shape but slightly different in color.
Danny looked around again. The town at his back was frozen. Evaline was crouched, one hand extended to Matthias, her mouth open to call him back. Danny waved a hand before Matthias’s face. Nothing happened.
“Oh God,” he whispered.
This isn’t possible. Maybe he had taken one too many blows to the head. To control time, to make it stop completely, was … was …